1. The 1996 Telecommunications Act was the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in the United States since the Federal Communications Commission was founded at the dawn of the Second World War in 1934. During the signing ceremony, Bill Clinton used the same pen Dwight D. Eisenhower had used to sign the Federal Highway Act of 1956, before proceeding to sign a digital copy of the bill across a touchscreen surface 1 – making the 1996 Telecommunications Act the first piece of legislation signed in cyberspace. 2

2. The 1990’s saw a new era defined by a techno-optimist spirit as well as the market confidence of the dot-com bubble. Meanwhile the opening up of previously inaccessible geopolitical markets enabled the global dominance of the neoliberal order. Speaking at the signing ceremony of the 1996 Telecommunication Act, Democratic from Senator Fritz Hollings (D) of South Carolina declared: “As of now the Berlin Wall of telecommunications has been demolished”. 3

3. Under Title II of the act, a diversity of communications streams such as broadcast television, landline and mobile telephony – and for the first time ever the Internet – were bundled under one piece of legislation. The 1996 act cited more competition and the empowerment of American entrepreneurs and families with the freedom of more choices at lower costs. It effectively deregulated the Internet and opened up public utilities to private enterprise. However until late 2017 under Title II, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were prohibited from creating artificial scarcity by throttling content. Throttling would allow ISPs to capitalize upon the creation of fast and slow content traffic lanes. Opponents of such free-market deregulation feared the precedent where not all content would load equally as a logical first step to some content not being able to load at all. In anticipation of this year’s repeal of Title II, DIS produced Polimbo, a website-survey that acts as a political compass on the issue of net neutrality, presented in the exhibition on a phone that’s charging behind the gallery’s reception desk. Occasionally accessible in the gallery’s office, Goldin+Senneby’s After Microsoft… tells the story of how a California hillside came to collide with a global branding strategy.

4. Speed of access becomes the predominant aesthetic in the wake of a deregulated communication-scape. The work in this exhibition comes together as fragmentations of both language and form, presenting a series of truncated narratives which materialize in a half-loaded format of dis connectivity. Nina Canell’s subterranean fibre-optic cable sheathings are gathered from high grade cables employed in Korean communication networks. Not yet introduced in European and North American infrastructures, these cables are already being replaced in Korea.

5. Jason Matthew Lee’s work with modified payphones and payphone shells express the early hacking cultures of network exploration known as ‘phreaking’. 4 Lee’s works bare a connection to Canell’s emptied out cable skins which also engage with the real passageways of communication infrastructures to evoke a visceral vocality.

6. Just as Lee and Canell’s works are cut off and segmented from a larger network, the exhibition presents an incomplete selection of canvases from Simon Denny’s scalable body of work The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom. Since 2013 Denny has chronicled an ongoing portrait of Internet entrepreneur turned activist Kim Dotcom through an iterative documentary style exhibition-making practice. 5 Kim Dotcom’s website Megaupload was one of the most visited file-sharing platforms until his assets, servers and websites were seized in a high profile FBI raid on his New Zealand compound. 6

7. The work of Dena Yago and Catherine Telford-Keogh equally deal with the entanglement and congestion of language when physicalized into tangible forms. Dena Yago’s CNC’d rubber text works speak to the perennial ways in which form obfuscates and redefines the reception of language. Her work Remove the Outside and the Inside Remains recalls the gestures of deregulation to ‘remove’ and ‘cut away to the essential’. Considering Yago’s work in relation to Nina Canell’s dislocated cable sheathings, the transmutability of materials make apparent how material can be the conduit for information while equally being the information itself. Catherine Telford-Keogh’s work slows the outside world by materializing into hardened pools and large panes of confinement. Telford-Keogh draws on an interest in phonetics and form to explore a sensory memory that internalizes the ways that language shapes material. 7

8. This exhibition is the second chapter of a two-part collaboration with VIE D’ANGE. Aude Pariset’s Promession® #1 remains from the previous exhibition at the gallery. This work comprises a colony of mealworms which have been eating away at styrofoam while hermetically encased in a bed frame. This ecosystem has both matured and deteriorated into an uneven state; where some worms have perished,
others keep eating and some have transformed into beetles leaving
skin sheddings in their wake.

2.
In response to Clinton and Gore’s symbolic foray of establishing
law in cyber space, the cyber-libertarian John Perry Barlow – an
American poet, essayist and lyric writer for the Grateful Dead –
wrote his influential manifesto A Declaration for Cyber Independence,
proclaiming: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants
of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On
behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You
are not welcome among us.

You
have no sovereignty where we gather”.Perry
Barlow, John. (8 February 1996, Davos Switzerland.) “A Declaration
of the Independence of Cyberspace”. Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Retrieved 20th March 2018.

4.
As a predecessor to computer hacking, the subculture of Phreaking
emerged alongside cybernetics and within the political turmoil of the
late 1960’s. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak cites Phreaking as a
profound influence upon him as a young programmer. In her essay
Phreaks, Hackers and Trolls: The Politics of Transgression and
Spectacle, Gabriella Coleman describes how communications law evolved
in response to Phreaking by citing Ursula Le Guin: “To Make a
Thief, Make an Owner; to Create Crime, Create Laws”.

5.
Denny has indexed the 110 items seized by the US Government and
rematerialized them as inkjet printed canvases, often exhibiting the
canvases with copies and replicas of the seized property. According
to the artist, these seized possessions represent a sort of venn
diagram of shared systems of value between Kim Dotcom and the US
Authorities. The Grand Jury indictment is printed and displayed next
to the canvases. It includes a full list of the seized property.

6.
During the 1990’s, as a teenager, Kim Schmitz (better known as Kim
Dotcom) used to hack the databases of AT&T and other major phone
companies. Exploiting the vulnerabilities of an emerging global
telecoms infrastructure, it is alleged that Schmitz made bulk
purchases of stolen phone card information from American hackers.
Schmitz then set up premium chat lines in Hong Kong and in the
Caribbean and used a “war dialer” program to call the lines en
masse with the stolen card numbers – generating over €50,000 in
ill-gained profits.

7.
Through an expansive inventory of mass produced consumables, such as
trademarked food items and institutional cleaning products,
Telford-Keogh’s work amasses a material economy of the everyday to
conjure an uncanny encounter – where recollection of material
memory overcomes a sanitization of the senses.

________________________________

BIOGRAPHIES:

Nina
Canell (Born Sweden,1979, lives and works in Berlin). Canell’s
work, in general, deals with invisible energies made apparent.
Inheriting core tenets from Fluxus, her work is situated somewhere
between established, static sculpture and the performativity of
natural events or occurrences. Her recent sculptures employ fragments
or ‘cuttings’ from high voltage cables, which first emerged in
her significant 2014 solo shows at Camden Arts Centre, London;
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and formed the core of her presentations
at Art Basel, Hong Kong, and Witte de With, Rotterdam. In this
exhibition Canell exhibits new cuttings from subterranean fiber optic
cables used in Korea. Not yet implemented in Europe, these high grade
cables are already being replaced in Asia.

Simon
Denny was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1982.He
graduated with a BFA from the University of Auckland’s Elam School
of Fine Arts in 2004, and completed his Meisterschuler at
Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste,
Frankfurt am Main (2009). Recent exhibitions include The Founder’s
Paradox, Michael Lett, Auckland (2017), Real Mass Entrepeneurship,
OCAT, Shenzen (2017), Blockchain Future States, Petzel Gallery, New
York (2016), Products for Organising, Serpentine Sackler Gallery,
London (2015), The Innovator’s Dilemma, MOMA PS1, New York (2015)
and The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington
(2014). Denny was selected to represent New Zealand at the 56th
Venice Biennale, exhibiting Secret Power at the New Zealand Pavilion.
Simon Denny currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

DIS
is a New York–based collective formed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon
Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro. DIS works across a wide range of
media, most recently transitioning platforms from an online magazine
to a video-streaming edutainment channel. The group has become the
central nucleus of an ever-growing international community of
artists, musicians, photographers, writers, and designers;
functioning as artists and curators, DIS weaves together the content
of collaborators with their own to propose discourse around chosen
topics. DIS curated the 9th Berlin Biennale in 2016. In this
exhibition DIS has contributed Polimbo, a mobile app-questionnaire
which allows users to locate themselves on a political spectrum of
net neutrality. This summer DIS will be in Winnipeg as guest
instructors of the 2018 Summer Institute at Plug In Institute for
Contemporary Art.

Goldin+Senneby
(since 2004) is a framework for collaboration set up by artists Simon
Goldin and Jakob Senneby; exploring juridical, financial and spatial
constructs through notions of the performative and the virtual. Their
collaboration started with The Port (2004-06); acting in an emerging
public sphere constructed through digital code. In their more recent
body of work, known as Headless (2007 -), they approach the sphere of
offshore finance, and its production of virtual space through legal
code. Looking at strategies of withdrawal and secrecy, they trace an
offshore company on the Bahamas called Headless Ltd. A ghostwritten
detective novel continuously narrates their investigations. Since
2010 their work has focused on The Nordenskiold Model, an experiment
in theatrical finance, in which they attempt to (re)enact the
anarchoalchemical scheme of 18th century alchemist August
Nordenskiold on the financial markets of today.

She
studied Sculpture at the Yale School of Art (2011) and Women, Gender
and Sexuality Studies at Yale University(2013). She has participated
in group exhibitions at Seattle Art Museum, WA; Bronx Museum, NYC;
The Alice, WA; Vox Populi, PA; Baby’s All Right, Brooklyn, NYC;
Greenpoint Film Festival, Brooklyn, NYC and recently mounted solo
exhibitions at Roberta Palen, Toronto and Evans Contemporary,
Peterborough, Ont. She was awarded the Fanie B. Pardee Prize, Yale
School of Art, 2011, the Susan S. Clark award, Yale University, 2013
and was a finalist for the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, Yale School
of Art, 2011.

Dena
Yago is an artist who was born in 1988. She has had numerous gallery
and museum exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art in
Warsaw and at Bodega in New York.

Galerie
Antoine Ertaskiran was established in 2012 and is located in a
restored welding workshop in the Griffintown neighborhood in
Montréal. In the course of its early development the gallery has
already gained an excellent reputation and become recognized as one
of the most important galleries in Canada. The gallery also aims to
engage wider audiences with current practices in contemporary arts,
and through this to connect them with contemporary social issues. The
gallery’s program focuses on emerging and mid-career contemporary
artists from Montréal, Canada and abroad.

VIE
D’ANGE is a collaboration between Daphné Boxer and Eli Kerr
founded in 2016. Together they produce exhibitions from a 300 m²
former auto-body garage divided into two gallery spaces in Montréal,
Canada. With a focus on material legacies of technological shifts and
their subsequent reorganization of social systems, Boxer and Kerr
approach their exhibition program as a continuous yet non-linear
script of episodic narratives.